The Orphan Girl

- Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809 – 1831)

Her hair was black as a raven's wings,

Her cheek the tulip's hue did wear,
Her voice was soft as when night winds sing,
Her brow was as a moonbeam fair;
Her sire had joined the wake of war;-
The battle-shock, the shout, and scar
He knew, and gained a glorious grave-
Such is the guerdon of the brave!-
Her anguished mother's suffering heart
Could not endure a widow's part;
She sunk beneath her soul's distress,
And left her infant parentless.-
She hath no friend on this cold, bleak earth,
To give her a shelter, a home, and a hearth;
Fhrough life's dreary desert alone she must wend,
For alas! the wretched have never a friend!
And should she stray from virtue's way,
The world will scorn, and its scorn can slay.
1 Ah! Shame hath enough to wring the breast
With a weight of sorrow and guilt oppres'd;
But Oh! 'tis coldly cruel to wound
The bosom whose blood must gush unbound.
No tear is so bright as the tear that flows
For erring woman's unpitied woes;
And blest be forever his honoured name
Who shelters an orphan from sorrow and shame!
 An Introduction
- Kamala Das (1934 – 2009)

Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better

I don't know politics but I know the names
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Choose a name, a role. Don't play pretending
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
games.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
Don't play at schizophrenia or be a
I speak three languages, write in
Nympho. Don't cry embarrassingly loud when
Two, dream in one.
Jilted in love … I met a man, loved him. Call
Don't write in English, they said, English is
Him not by any name, he is every man
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
haste
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans' tireless
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
All mine, mine alone.
The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
It is as human as I am human, don't
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
2 towns,
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother's trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don't sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
 Hunger
- Jayanta Mahapatra (born 22 October 1928)

It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.

The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,
trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words
sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.
I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

I followed him across the sprawling sands,

my mind thumping in the flesh's sling.
Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.
Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth
his old nets had only dragged up from the seas.

In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound.

The wind was I, and the days and nights before.
Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack
an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.
Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.

3 I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen...

Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.
The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile.
Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.
She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,
the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
 Night of the Scorpion
- Nissim Ezekiel (1924 – 2004)

I remember the night my mother groaning on a mat.

was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours My father, sceptic, rationalist,
of steady rain had driven him trying every curse and blessing,
to crawl beneath a sack of rice. powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
Parting with his poison - flash upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
of diabolic tail in the dark room - I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
he risked the rain again. I watched the holy man perform his rites to
tame the poison with an incantation.
The peasants came like swarms of flies After twenty hours
and buzzed the name of God a hundred times it lost its sting.
to paralyse the Evil One.
My mother only said
With candles and with lanterns Thank God the scorpion picked on me
throwing giant scorpion shadows And spared my children.
on the mud-baked walls
they searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
4 With every movement that the scorpion made his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said.

May he sit still, they said

May the sins of your previous birth
be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world

against the sum of good

become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh

of desire, and your spirit of ambition,

they said, and they sat around
on the floor with my mother in the centre,
the peace of understanding on each face.
More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours,
more insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through,
 A Poem for Mother
- Robin S Ngangom (born 1959)

Palem Apokpi, mother who gave birth to me, cooked for the remainder of us. I can see
to be a man how I hated leaving home you
ten years ago. Now these hills returning every dusk from the bazaar,
have grown on me. your head laden with baskets.

But I’m still your painfully shy son
with a ravenous appetite,
the boy who lost many teeth after
emptying your larder. And
I am also your dreamy-eyed lad
who gave you difficult times
during his schooldays, romancing
every girl he wanted, even
when he still wore half-pants.
Must you end toiling forever?
I’m sorry Palem.
I’ve inherited nothing
of your stable ways or culinary skills.
Forgive me, for all your dreams
of peace during your remnant days
I turned out to be a small man
with small dreams, living a small life.

You told your children that

money and time do not grow on trees, and
5 I could never learn to keep up with them.

It isn’t that I’ve forgotten

what you’ve come to mean to me
though I abandoned much and left
so little of myself for others
to remember me.

I know how you work your fingers to the bone

as all mothers do, for unmarried sons,
ageing husband and liberated daughters-in-law.

Worried about us, for a long time

your lips couldn’t burgeon in a smile,
lines have furrowed your face and
first signs of snow are on your hair.

Today, as on every day you must have risen

with temple bells before cockcrow, swept
the floors and after the sacred bath
 Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote her Name
- Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise."
"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."

6
 The Sun Rising
- John Donne (1572–1631)

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
7 Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She's all states, and all princes, I,

Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
 To His Coy Mistress
- Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

Had we but world enough and time, Let us roll all our strength and all
This coyness, lady, were no crime. Our sweetness up into one ball,
We would sit down, and think which way And tear our pleasures with rough strife
To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Through the iron gates of life:
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
8 For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.